Two Honored with Ellis R. Ott Scholarship

Each year, the Ellis R. Ott Scholarship Governing Committee awards two $7,500 scholarships to reward promising master’s and PhD candidates pursuing degrees in statistics and related disciplines. This year’s recipients are the following:

• Valeria Ovalle Ocampo, MS, industrial engineering, University of Illinois at Chicago
• Luke Hagar, PhD, statistics, University of Waterloo

Valeria Ovalle Ocampo

Awardee in the MS Category

Ovalle Ocampo completed numerous internships with Colombian companies and public institutions, where she used statistical studies to enhance plant production design aimed at improving the quality of the work environment and reducing musculoskeletal injuries.

She was also involved in a project geared toward implementing a standardized system for the improvement of management quality for a hospital serving the indigenous communities of the Valle del Cauca in Colombia. During this time, she helped with data collection from the Indigenous population of the Embera Chamí to devise projects that would help the hospital better serve the community.

She is currently working on her thesis, which focuses on ergonomics and human factors to improve workstation design to both optimize production and prevent overuse lower back injuries.

Ovalle Ocampo is passionate about improving industrial quality, and her primary goal is to become a lean manufacturing expert.

Luke Hagar

Awardee in the PhD Category

Hagar recently taught an undergraduate course at Waterloo in computational statistics and data analysis. He has also helped organize several conferences with the American Society for Quality and Statistical Society of Canada.

Hagar has conducted applied statistics research in collaboration with data scientists at Airbnb and linguistics professors to characterize variation in speech patterns. His research interests involve helping practitioners characterize real-life phenomena with flexible statistical models when designing studies. Since designing such studies typically requires intensive computer simulation, it is important to develop reliable and computationally efficient methods for study design.

The scholarship program honors Ellis R. Ott, founder of one of the earliest US-based applied and mathematical statistics departments at Rutgers University. Ott was a recipient of the Shewhart Medal and an early collaborator in the founding of the American Society for Quality.

Members of the Ellis R. Ott Scholarship Governing Board include Mark Vandeven (chair), William Henry, Mindy Hotchkiss, J. Stuart Hunter, Tom Murphy, Marcus Perry, Susan O. Schall, Ronald Snee, J. Richard Trout, Neil Ullman, and Lynne Hare.

Ellis R. Ott scholarships are awarded under the auspices of the Statistics Division of the American Society for Quality.